Name: Pretty Deep for a Cartoon | Soul | 5th Anniversary
Uploaded: 2026-01-12T17:33:22.000Z
Duration: 6 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

Working on Pete Docter's films are always incredibly special because he chooses these deep ideas that everyone can connect to in some way.

Gerund

I remember pitching this film to somebody and saying, you know, and

so the whole purpose of this story is to really explore.

Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I'm about to say the meaning of life.

He'd only picked, like, the biggest, heaviest, most, like, universal topic in the world.

The movie is so ambitious because it ultimately becomes really universal.

And it's highlighting these questions of, like, why we're trying to do the things that we're doing.

Where did we come from, and how do we get the way that we are, and

what are we supposed to do with the time that we have while we're here?

The big concept of the film is this idea of the great before we're calling it.

When you see your kids born or you meet babies and they already have kind of a unique personality.

When my children were born, you look them in the eye and it's like you already kind of know who they are.

And what is that crazy mix of personality traits that you can get?

And it's almost an infinite number of personality traits that can create an infinite number of personalities.

And we just started to riff off of all of that.

The noobs are the key to little kids, right?

So that if we can find appeal, they're like the puppies of the movie.

That should be so cute and funny and unexpected.

This is the moment where I fell in love with jazz.

We knew we wanted Joe to be an artist because it spoke to us.

There was a short period of time where Joe was an actor and he lands his big break on Broadway.

Cause Pete and I have this deep love of jazz.

What's so brilliant about jazz musicians is that they're able to take the feeling of the audience, the specific tune that was chosen, the riff that the bass player did.

An expression of something that's deep in them in a very specific way.

Soul is a story of a man who, for all of his life, he's felt like his life's purpose was to be a musician, who, on the day that he gets his dream, after decades and decades of work, dies.

Joe feels like there is one way my life should go.

So that's basically what Joe is experiencing.

His blink is beginning to close and open and be over.

Keith ends up in the place called the you seminar.

And there he meets the school soul number 22, who's been there for maybe thousands of years.

And it's kind of through their relationship and through 22 that he realizes, this is how I'm gonna get back to my body.

The problem is 22 has no interest in Earth.

The world doesn't revolve around you, 22.

That's why she's a difficult mentee, because she's seen it all, already heard it all, and

We like to say that this story is what happens when a soul who doesn't want to die finds himself stuck with a soul who doesn't want to live.

We kind of always knew the root of what she was, which was that she was a cynic.

The ways in which she's cynical and the things that she's scared of are really relatable, you know, and

Things can be painful, and everyone has moments of like, ugh, it's too much.

I like the phrase jo mo, which is the opposite of fomo, which is the joy of missing out.

That's kind of where 22 is residing at the beginning of the movie.

I'm sure your life was amazing and you did amazing things.

We're gonna stand here in silence for a little bit, then we go back out.

Joe is a guy who's so passionate and driven and.

I think probably a more common experience for people in the world is more like 22 who thinks that's what I should have, but

You know, is it that you do have a gift and you just have to keep working at it to uncover it?

Or does it mean that the universe is like really mean and gives some people gifts and other people not, which I hope is not true.

Her experience as a character feeling unworthy or that she's not good enough is something a lot of us struggle with.

The music is just an excuse to bring out the you.

That passion that you can have for something can really make you grow as a person, but

A gift and a curse are kind of two sides of the same coin.

Most of the time we think of passion and drive as being really positive.

I mean, however, the dark side of it is that it can exclude you from really living.

It can blind you from the gifts that you might walk right past because you're so myopically focused on this one thing.

I've been waiting on this day for my entire life.

I thought I'd feel different by the end of the film.

He's after something else that's actually much more universal and important.

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Pretty Deep for a Cartoon | Soul | 5th Anniversary

ultimately

specific

struggle

awesome